Chinese Whispers (The China Thrillers 6) Page 30

  Wu looked at Qian, who nodded. ‘I’ll get on with it,’ he said.

  ‘Wu.’ Li put a hand on his arm to stop him. ‘Where’s his wife?’

  ‘In the apartment. There’s a female officer with her. She’s pretty upset.’

  ‘Maybe I should identify the body for the record,’ Li said. ‘Save her the trauma.’

  Wu shrugged. ‘She’s already done it, Chief. Insisted on seeing him.’

  Li nodded and Wu went off to issue instructions to the other detectives. He turned to Qian. ‘I’d like Margaret to do the autopsy.’

  Qian raised an eyebrow. ‘That might be a bit difficult, Chief.’

  Li said, ‘The Americans are probably going to request that one of their people do it anyway. And if we move fast, do it tonight, then it’ll be a fait accompli.’

  ‘Okay,’ Qian said. ‘I’ll set it up.’

  ‘One other thing, Qian,’ Li said. ‘I don’t want my son and my niece left alone in the apartment. Is there any way we can get an officer to stay with them until after the autopsy?’

  Qian shook his head. ‘Not officially. I’d never get away with it.’ He hesitated. ‘But like I said, officially I’m off duty. I’ll stay with them. No one’ll lay a finger on them while I’m there, Chief. You can count on it.’

  Li looked into the eyes of the older man and saw in them only devotion and trust. He wanted to hug him, but all he said was, ‘I know.’

  * * *

  Lyang was like a shadow, insubstantial, almost transparent. She sat in a trance at the dining table where they should have eaten the previous night, her hands in front of her, fingers interlocked. Her eyes were swollen nearly shut. She turned them on Li as he pulled out a chair and sat down opposite her. The female officer got up and moved away. Forensics were through in the living room, examining the balcony in the minutest detail. It was from one of its windows that Hart had fallen. They had already found damage to the sill, and scuff marks on the polished mahogany floor that Hart and Lyang had been so careful to protect with slippers laid out at the door for guests. Nothing else seemed out of place, Chinese rugs and wall hangings, the stereo switched on, but the music on pause. There was a drink sitting on the drinks cabinet. Untouched. It was one of Hart’s faux margaritas. The ice was all melted now. He must have mixed it when he came in. Hardly the actions of a man about to throw himself off a balcony. Perhaps he had put on the music, mixed himself a drink, and then there had been a knock at the door. He’d put the music on pause, put down his drink and let in his killer.

  Lyang spoke unprompted, softly, her voice hoarse. ‘He called me about two hours ago on my cellphone,’ she said, and Li found it hard not to feel an overwhelming sense of guilt when he met her eyes, even although there was no hint of accusation in them. ‘He said he thought he had cracked the graphs. That’s exactly what he said. I didn’t know what he meant, but he didn’t want to say any more on the phone. He said he would tell me when we met back here. I was at the supermarket with Ling. I finished the shopping and came straight back.’ Her voice tailed off and she pressed her lips together, eyes closed, regaining composure. ‘I missed him by about fifteen minutes. The police were already here, along with just about every nosey goddamned neighbour in the complex.’

  Li reached across the table and put his hand over both of hers. It was fully a minute before she could bring herself to continue. ‘I wish … I wish I’d been able to see him one last time. You know, just to appreciate him for the lovely man he was. To let him know that I loved him.’ She caught her breath, and closed her eyes to stop herself from weeping. ‘Last time I saw him was this morning when he left the apartment. You know how it is. You don’t pay any attention. You don’t expect to not ever see someone again. I can’t even remember how he looked, if I said goodbye, if he was smiling, or if I was. All I can remember is … is how he was down there.’ She tilted her head almost imperceptibly towards the window.

  ‘You don’t have to talk right now,’ Li said.

  ‘I want to,’ she insisted. A sudden flame of anger burned in her eyes. ‘I came back up here and cried like I’ve never cried in my life. I cried so hard it was physically painful.’ She put her hand to her chest. ‘I can still feel it, like cracked ribs.’ She took a deep breath. ‘And there comes a point when you just can’t cry any more. Not straight off, anyway. And I got to thinking how I could do something positive. Something Bill would have wanted me to do. So I searched the apartment to see what he had brought home with him. There was nothing here. Nothing in his study. Not even his briefcase. And he always had his briefcase with him. So then I phoned the academy, and they said he had taken everything away with him.’ She clutched Li’s hand with both of hers. ‘They killed him, didn’t they?’ she said. ‘They came in here and threw him off the balcony and stole all his stuff. And we’ll never know what it was he found. What he meant when he said he’d cracked the graphs.’

  And Li knew she was right. That his last chance of identifying Lynn Pan’s killer and understanding why she had to die had gone out of the window with Bill Hart. The killer was going to get away with it. Two people dead. Li’s career in ruins, his future and his family torn apart. And not one way that Li could think of to strike back.

  For the first time, he let the suspicions he had been suppressing for most of the day fizz to the forefront of his mind. There was only one person who knew everything Li knew. Only one person he had told. Commissioner Zhu, that morning in the Commissioner’s apartment. The Commissioner had subsequently spoken to the Director General of the Political Department, Yan Bo, but how much had he told him? Enough to prompt him to warn Li off. But how much had Yan Bo known about Hart? When the Commissioner had asked Li how he intended to find out who the liar was, he’d told him, I’ve asked Bill Hart to gather together all the various pieces of information necessary to make that apparent. Li felt ill at the thought that those words might have sealed Hart’s fate.

  And then there was the empty pack of Russian cheroots in the trash in the office of the Commissioner’s secretary. The same brand as those found beside the Ripper victims, the same brand that forensics had retrieved from the crime scene at the Millennium Monument. Zhu would have had full access to the files on the Ripper murders. Hadn’t the Commissioner himself asked Li for daily reports? He would have known what brand of cheroot had been found at the Ripper crime scenes. Easy enough to buy a pack at any tobacconist’s, leave one at the scene of Pan’s murder, dispose of the rest. But it was careless of him to throw the empty pack in the trash. Was it a sign of his arrogance, his supreme confidence that he was untouchable? Or did he simply just never envisage a circumstance in which it might have been seen there?

  And who else would have had the power to engineer Li’s suspension, to take his life apart the way it had been? There wasn’t anything about Li he wouldn’t know. He had his mole in Li’s section, his informant, someone who would keep him in touch with everything going on in that office. Li realised he would probably never even know who that was.

  There was something else which had been troubling him. A memory from that afternoon at the academy when he and the Commissioner had been briefed together on the murder for the MERMER test. A picture in Li’s head of the ease with which the Commissioner had handled the murder weapon, a large hunting knife serrated at the hilt. You look like you were born with one of those in your hands, he had said to him. And the Commissioner had told him about his hunting trips with his father in the forests of Xinjiang Province. We killed the animals by slitting their throats, he had said. My father taught me how to gut a deer in under ten minutes. He knew how to use a knife. How easy would it have been for him draw a blade across Lynn Pan’s throat?

  All of which brought him back to the single, most troubling question of all. Why?

  Lyang’s voice dragged him away from his darkest thoughts. ‘Li Yan …’ He looked at her. ‘Don’t leave me alone. Please. I don’t think I could face a night here on my own.’

  ‘Lyang …’
Li squeezed her hands. ‘We need to establish … we need to know that Bill was pushed.’

  ‘You mean an autopsy?’ She seemed almost matter-of-fact about it. And Li remembered that she had been a cop. She knew the procedure.

  He nodded. ‘I’m going to ask Margaret to do it.’

  And something about that thought made the tears fill her eyes again. It was some moments before she could speak. ‘I’m glad,’ she said. Then even through her pain and tears she found something to make her smile. A memory of the character that her husband had been. ‘He’d have enjoyed the irony.’ But the smile was short-lived, and she bit her lip.

  ‘We’ll come over here afterwards, with Li Jon and my niece, Xinxin. Spend the night if you want.’

  ‘I’d like that.’

  And from the bedroom they heard the sound of baby Ling crying. Tears, perhaps, for the father she would never know.

  II

  Li stood on the steps of the pathology department watching the headlights of vehicles probing the mist on the Badaling Expressway. Above it, the sky was inky dark, the stars clearer out here on the fringes of the city, away from the lights and the pollution. He cut a faintly absurd figure in his green smock and shower cap, but he was oblivious of his appearance, even if there had been anyone there to see him. There were only a few vehicles in the carpark, one or two lights in windows dotted about the dark frontage of the building. A minimum staff on night shift. He had needed air before he could face the autopsy. There had been too many familiar faces recently staring back at him with dead eyes from the autopsy table. It had been only yesterday morning that Lynn Pan had come under the pathologist’s knife. Now Bill Hart. Li remembered the soft, seductive voice teasing the confession from the child abuser. Hart himself had described the polygraph as a psychological rubber hose. But that was not how he had used it. He had found empathy with his subjects, made a connection between them with his simple humanity. He had not deserved to die like this.

  Li took a last lungful of ice cold air, and turned back into the building.

  Margaret looked up as he came through the door into the autopsy room. Their eyes met briefly in common bond. Pathologist Wang stood on the opposite side of Hart’s shattered body. Wu leaned against a wall watching from a distance. Margaret had performed autopsies before on people she knew. But somehow this was much more distressing. She had hardly known Bill Hart, but something about his sense of humour had chimed with her. And their history, although short, had been so recent. Just twenty-four hours ago he had been wiring her up for a polygraph test she never took. A battle of wits they had never fought. And she remembered with a jolt her wisecrack at lunch that first day they met. He had offered to prove the efficacy of the polygraph by giving her a test, and she had agreed, but only if he would let her give him an autopsy. Everyone around the table had roared with laughter. He had never given her that test, but she was about to perform the autopsy. It seemed now like a sick joke.

  She closed her eyes for a moment to drag her professionalism back from the edge of despair. When she opened them again, she took in the broken body that lay on the table in front of her and wiped all memory of Bill Hart from her mind. His head was markedly misshapen, with open comminuted fractures of all the cranial bones, and wide lacerations over the scalp. Multiple blunt force injuries is how she would describe them in her report, but the words were insufficient to describe the devastation.

  His teeth were in good repair and, remarkably, undamaged, but the maxilla and mandible bones of the jaw were both fractured. There was blood in his mouth and nostrils, and his lips were blue. She spoke up for the benefit of the microphone recording her external examination.

  The neck has been rendered asymmetrical due to fractures. There are faint and poorly defined areas of acchymosis about the neck, and there is palpable bony crepitance on rotation of the base of the head.

  ‘He landed on his head by the looks of it,’ she said and glanced up to see the pain in Li’s eyes.

  The chest is also markedly misshapen by fractures of all of the ribs and a wide laceration that crosses from the left shoulder area over to the right lower chest, through which there is avulsion of muscle and portions of rib and internal organs.

  Somehow in the fall, there had been a traumatic amputation of the left forearm and hand. The autopsy assistant handed it to Margaret in a plastic bag.

  The recovered distal left upper extremity is received separately in a red plastic bag, and comprises the distal forearm and hand. The medial aspect of the wrist bears abraded laceration, and the third and fourth nailbeds bear subungual hematoma. There is a pink, flaky material with the appearance, possibly, of skin under the left third and fourth fingernails.

  Margaret turned to examine the right hand.

  The nailbeds of the right first and fourth fingers show red-purple subungual hematoma, and the index fingernail is torn.

  ‘Is there significance in that?’ Li asked, detecting her concern.

  ‘It means that he put up a hell of a fight not to get thrown out that window. I think we’ll find his attacker’s DNA in the skin under his fingernails.’ She didn’t want to think about his panic in those last moments as he fought desperately to stay alive, and she moved quickly to the legs, only to find more evidence of his struggle. She fought a different battle, to control the emotion in her voice.

  There is a patterned abraded contusion crossing the anterior right thigh. This 3 x 1-½ inch, horizontally oriented area bears vertically oriented striations within the abrasion, and contains what appears to be splinters of wood and varnish.

  Almost identical abrasions were evident on the left thigh, above multiple fractures of the femur, tibia and fibula. She turned to Wang. ‘Not sustained in the fall. Do you agree, Doctor?’

  Wang nodded. ‘Bruising too defined,’ he said. ‘Dark purple, compared with other bruising, which is not so dark, not so defined.’

  ‘And almost symmetrical. Pretty much consistent with him being forced out of the window,’ Margaret said. ‘Bracing himself against the sill, but being manhandled over it.’

  They moved on to the internal examination, where the injuries were even more horrific. There was not much left of the lungs or the heart, the pleural and pericardial cavities having been lacerated by the multiple fractured rib ends, as had the diaphragm and the peritoneal cavity. The spinal column was completely severed. It was a catalogue of fractures – cranial, facial, spinal, the pelvis, the arms, the legs. Most of the organs had been lacerated or torn apart by the force of the impact.

  ‘There’s no doubt, then?’ Li said finally.

  ‘You know pathologists never like to commit themselves,’ Margaret said. She looked into Bill Hart’s clear, open, undamaged eyes, and remembered the life and mischief with which they had once shone. She raised her eyes to meet Li’s. ‘But if you’re asking me, he didn’t jump.’

  She moved away from the table, pulling down her mask to suck in air. She had had enough, and was content to let Wang finish up. ‘I need to shower,’ she said to Li. ‘I’ll meet you in the lobby.’

  She stood under the jets of hot water, letting them run freely over her upturned face and streaming down her body, soaking away a little of the tension that held her in its grip. It was probably the last autopsy she would ever perform in China. She had no idea if she would be on an airplane back to the States on Saturday, or cooped up at the US Embassy with her baby son. Neither scenario was one that she wanted to entertain. Nor could she face the thought of another autopsy back home. If that was where she ended up. She had seen more than enough death to last her a lifetime. Perhaps it was giving birth that had changed her. The creation of life, as opposed to picking over the remains of it. Whatever it was, right now she no longer had the stomach for it.

  She let her fingers trace the scar of her Caesarian. It was still hard to believe that by cutting her open they had brought life into the world. Her son. And her thoughts turned to his father. Only now, faced with the prospect of losing him,
did she realise how unthinkable it was. However unsatisfactory their life here might have been, at least they had been together. And in the end it was that having, that belonging, which mattered most. She wished she could do more to help him, but other than her job she had no idea what. She was as helpless in the face of his faceless enemy as he was.

  She dried herself vigorously with the towel and slipped back into jeans and sweatshirt, pulling on her trainers, and drowning herself in the warmth of a large, quilted anorak. Li was waiting for her in the lobby and took her in his arms in a long, silent hug, cradling her head against his chest. She felt small like that, all wrapped up in him, safe from the world and everything out there that was trying to harm them. But she knew it was an illusion. No one was keeping Li safe from harm.

  ‘Section Chief.’ The voice made them break apart, and Li turned to see the head of the pathology lab crossing the lobby towards them, double doors swinging in his wake. Professor Nie Rong was a tall, skinny man, with tiny lozenge-shaped spectacles perched always below the bridge of an unusually long nose. The few strands of hair that remained to him were carefully arranged across his great, bald dome. His white lab coat flapped open as he walked, and Li wondered what the head of the laboratory was doing here at this time of night. He seemed oddly reticent, reluctant to meet Li’s eye. He shook hands with Margaret, and then folded his arms across his chest, still clutching a well-thumbed folder in his left hand. Li speculated on whether he might be embarrassed by Li’s presence at the facility. He must have heard that he had been suspended. ‘I’m sorry,’ the professor said. ‘There’s no easy way to say this …’

  ‘If you’re going to ask me to leave,’ Li said, ‘we’re just going.’